New Data Standards Will Dramatically Change Real Estate

WASHINGTON, DC. May 22, 1999.

The adoption of new industry standards for data
exchange will dramatically change the way real
estate transactions occur, Realtors were told today during a meeting of the Multiple
Listings Service forum at the National Association of Realtors' Midyear Governance
Meetings and Trade Expo. More than 6,000 Realtors and guests are attending the
May 20-24 [1999] meetings.

In April 1998, the NAR board of directors mandated the forum to "facilitate the
creation of data exchange standards for the industry in time for the Midyear
Meetings, 1999." The forum met today to hear the recommendations of the task
force representing leaders of the real estate industry and software and technology
specialists. Richard Mendenhall, NAR first vice president and a Realtor from
Columbia, Mo., who led the task force, explained the mission of the group, which
was formed to define detailed technical standards for Internet-based
communication and exchange of real estate property information. The draft
technical standards have now been documented in detail in the Real Estate
Transaction Specification or RETS, which has been published and made available
today for public comment. "These standards must be goal oriented, must be
implementable at a reasonable cost, and must operate in conjunction with most
current systems," Mendenhall explained. "I believe the task force has accomplished
this, and now we need to open up their findings for wider discussion and
comment."

Adoption of the new standards will provide a common way to communicate
Multiple Listing System (MLS) data and exchange that data between different
users; involve far less custom-coded interfaces; and increase competition among
software vendors seeking to serve the real estate industry. The standards are
intended for use over the Internet using extensible markup language (XML) and are
designed to provide safeguards to protect privacy and intellectual property.

In order to provide the best and widest input into the continuing development of
the data standards, the definitions and documentation of the draft standards have
now been posted on the Internet in a special directory where they are available for
a 60-day public comment period, starting today. The site is located at
http://www.rets-wg.org. The resulting comments will be considered by the task
force in a series of meetings culminating in a formal NAR board of directors' vote
on the proposed standards at the association's annual convention in Orlando next
November.

NAR Chief Information Officer Dale Stinton said, "We're looking for the best way to
develop these new standards, and we're asking everybody interested to be a part
of the process, because in our opinion, that's the best way to do something well."
Stinton reported that even though the standards are still in draft format, a number
of major software vendors are already beginning to encode these standards into
their software. "One day we'll wonder how we ever handled matters any other
way," Stinton added. Stinton explained that publication of the draft standards via
the Internet today was the beginning of an ongoing series of meetings with
specialists and practitioners during the summer and early fall, hopefully resulting
in presentation of the fully evolved standards by the time of the annual meeting in
November. "There is nothing really surprising here," Stinton said. "Technology has
and will dramatically change the way real estate transactions occur. This is just
one more step in this ongoing process," he said.

The National Association of Realtors, "The Voice for Real Estate," is the nation's
largest professional association, representing more than 730,000 members
involved in all aspects of the real estate industry.

Information about NAR is available at http://nar.realtor.com. This and other news
releases are posted in the Web site's "News for You" section.